(Un)Doing Tourism Anthropology: Outline of a Field of Practice (original) (raw)

2013, Journal of Tourism Challenges and Trends (Vol VI (2): 13-38)

The idea of ‘doing’ tourism anthropology is one that prompts reflection on a number of issues relating to this so-called sub-discipline, not least those that invites us to consider the merits of its negation: of ‘undoing’ some of the shibboleths that have attached themselves to the subject area. In this paper we argue the case for a critical re-evaluation of a discourse and state-of-the-art that is often re-drawn through recourse to the navigational tropes of ‘turn’ or ‘new directions’. While we are in no way suggesting that new analytical frameworks in the anthropological study of tourism should somehow be resisted, or that their ‘novelty’ precludes them from having intrinsic value and efficacy, couching debates in the language of ‘turns’ or ‘re-orientations’ can at times inhibit consideration of the benefits of consolidating, re-evaluating, or re-situating anthropological perspectives on tourism. Accordingly, there is a need to delineate more clearly a sense of intellectual lineage and methodological specificity, and to bring into sharper relief what it is that distinguishes (or aligns) the anthropology of tourism from (or with) perspectives developed in fields of cultural geography, for example, or business and marketing studies, disciplines that have all sought to claim purchase on ethnographic approaches to the study of tourism. The flipside of the ‘doing’ coin is the related problem of delineating what it is that constitutes the object of study itself: tourism and the tourist. (Un)doing tourism anthropology, therefore, also entails a process of ‘undoing’ the tourist: of paying greater recognition to the ways in which tourism mobilities converge, overlap, rub up against, or dissolve into the landscapes, spaces and everyday practices that anthropology more broadly has long set out to explore. Drawing on a lineage which, theoretically and ethnographically, encompasses developments in experiential and phenomenological anthropology, we argue that doing or undoing tourism anthropology is in part the practice of reinforcing the anthropos while at the same time looking critically askance at the category of ‘the tourist’.